Critical Hit(Image credit: Future)Welcome to Critical Hit, where I (or someone else on the PC Gamer team) celebrate and lament all things videogame music, audio design, and the ways our favourite games make our ears tingle.Despite my experience with League of Legends (the videogame) being incredibly minimal, I've spent years in admiration and awe at League of Legends (the music). Riot has found a real knack for taking its champs...

Consumer RTX 5090 stock in the US (and many other countries) seems to be virtually non-existent at the moment, despite Nvidia's claims that production is still ongoing. So, what's happening to all those brand new consumer cards?A leaked video reportedly taken from inside a Chinese factory may have the answer. Posted by HKEPC on X, the footage shows what appears to be a huge number of consumer RTX 5090 cards...

You'll never play every game. In fact, most people won't play most games—plenty of games release on Steam to approximately 0 user reviews, and last year, more than half of the 19,000 games that came out had fewer than 10. But that doesn't mean indies and anything else outside of the biggest blockbusters are all sent out to die. So far in 2026, all-original indies have been making waves.That insight...

As reported by IGN, veteran actors Jennifer Hale and Mark Meer, who voiced the female and male Commanders Shepard in Mass Effect, respectively, directly addressed fans of the series in an October 21 Instagram Live. The two reflected on BioWare, and commiserated over its tragic fate. Here are some highlights from each I pulled from the stream:Both actors' reactions strike me as so characteristic of their respective backgrounds: Hale is...

Valve's mandatory AI disclosures are once again at the centre of the discourse, mostly thanks to Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney, who has long been vocally against them. The debate has been reheated in the same month Epic Games proudly announced it will pivot to "AI first" development on its forthcoming Star Wars and Marvel crossover. Then it announced an AI game jam, before walking back its requirement for AI...

The idea of playing Deus Ex entirely in third person has always seemed like sacrilege to me. I like my immersive sims to be, well, immersive, to let me see the world through my character's eyes and interact with it up close and personal.Yet having just watched several videos of Deus Ex being played in third-person, I've realised that perhaps I wouldn't be so averse to experiencing Ion Storm's cyberpunk...

Well, here's a headscratcher. Paolo Pedercini, developer of Future? No Thanks! recently admitted to using generative AI in his ecosocialist satire while also referring to the technology as "a technofascist, anti-human and anti-art project." Now, the developer has removed several AI generated voice lines from the game, following a backlash to his use of the very technology which the game lampoons.You might remember Future? No Thanks! from another recent controversy,...

The Japan Actors Union, an org consisting of around 2,600 actors and voice actors, recently announced a series of measures to protect the rights of performers in the industry with regard to generative AI (reported in English via Automaton Media). It's been a hot topic both in Japan and here in the west, with Leon Kennedy actor Nick Apostolides arguing AI voice acting was something of an oxymoron: "AI can...

It seems like there's a new slightly-humorous-for-its-incongruity collab between game devs every other week at this point, and the latest in this sacred lineage is a team-up between Super Meat Boy 3D and Mouse: P.I. For Hire. The latter game's titular mouse detective has been squished into a cube-like shape and sent to navigate a hellish labyrinth full of sawblades for the rest of his miserable existence. Oh, and the...

Fans of Deus Ex, Dishonored and Gloomwood like to roll the words 'immersive sim' around their mouths as often as possible, savouring the fond associations with first-person drawer-rifling and guilt-ridden murder.Yet there's something like consensus emerging among the makers of these games: it's really hard to sell an immersive sim while calling it by its name. "Is it a good marketing term? No," says New Blood Interactive CEO Dave Oshry....